Picking Carbonated Cherries In 1975

He goes on : “It’s an estimate of the time at which the trend in global temperature took its modern value.”

As you can see in Phil Jones’ HadCRUT graph above, the 25 year period from about 1975 to 2000 did warm about half a degree C.

You can also see that the 30 year period from 1910 to 1940 similarly warmed about half a degree C. At that time, atmospheric CO2 averaged about 305 ppm, well below Dr. Hansen’s suggested “safe level” of 350 ppm. See the graph below for that period:

Global CO2 - click to enlarge

Here’s an annotated HadCRUT graph to help you see the relevant periods and the changes of temperature versus changes in global CO2 concentration during the same period:

The video below superimposes the 1975 warming (blue line) on the 1910 warming (black line.) Note the similarity in slope, duration and patterns. It would be difficult to explain the 1910 warming as being due to CO2, because CO2 was barely above pre-industrial levels and rose only 10 ppm during that period.

Given the similarity between the 1975 warming and the 1910 warming, it is irrational to blame the 1975 warming entirely on CO2. The practice of good science tells us to look for a hypothesis which can explain both similar warming periods.

If there is an influence of CO2 in the recent warming, it appears small. And the warming stopped ten years ago, as shown in the HadCRUT graph, despite rapid increases in CO2.

Or perhaps one might conclude that climate sensitivity has decreased as CO2 levels have risen. In 1910, with CO2 at 300 ppm, it only took ten additional ppm to raise temperatures by 0.5°C. By contrast, in 1975 it took about fifty ppm more to produce the same 0.5°C warming by the year 2000.

There were also periods of time with rising CO2, and little or no rise in temperature. From 1940 to 1980, there was no net warming while CO2 rose by 30 ppm. Since 1998, there has been no warming – as CO2 levels have risen 30 ppm.

Post navigation

152 thoughts on “Picking Carbonated Cherries In 1975”

Don’t know about the warming that ended in 1940 on the graph below (note how adjusted down it has been compared to what it was just ten years ago), but the post 1975 warming can be explained by the near simultaneous peaking of the AMO and PDO and UHI.

“I feel a chill of La Niña coming on. ”
Indeed. People are murmuring about the upcoming winter, and the feel of fall in the air.
They have not forgotten the late end of winter, and it’s on thier faces.
Nobody is listening to the global warming trumpets.
They are looking at the sky, the brightness of day, the plants & animals.
We may be at ground zero of La Nina.

It’s almost a perfect fit,
1880 to 1910 and 1940 t0 1970 all in the cooler mode!!!!
warm
1910 to 1940 and 1970 to 2000 warmer
I can’t believe the slopes match even the wiggles are the same!
Wow!
good post Steve Goddard!
My friend Tamino says that “the modern global warming era starts in 1975.”
thank you Tamino! for getting Steve to put the graft together.
The interesting thing is how are we flat lining for 10 years? 2000 to 2010?
faulty data? uhi? momentum is higher? solar activity was higher? 6-10 year lag?
pass the popcorn Vince Causey, while the corn grows!

Tamino…..1975…..
Huh, odd year to chose, because isn’t 1976 when the Great Pacific Climate Shift happened? I’m just askin’. Dang, must… have been…. an……um…. coincidence. How could Tamino have known?
(sarc off) (btw, do Carbonated Cherries have more flavor?)
2:32 video,
Chris de Freitas Ph.D, on El Nino and La Nina prevalence, which influences temperatures one way or the other:

rbateman says:
August 22, 2010 at 9:48 pm
“I feel a chill of La Niña coming on. ”
Indeed. People are murmuring about the upcoming winter, and the feel of fall in the air.
They have not forgotten the late end of winter, and it’s on thier faces.
Nobody is listening to the global warming trumpets.
They are looking at the sky, the brightness of day, the plants & animals.
We may be at ground zero of La Nina.
______
Could we call this La Nina alarmism? Here in Denver, where we were just one degree shy of a record high for August 22, at 97F, the only thing I saw on people’s faces were some nice suntans, and smiling neighbor kids playing in their pool. La Nina will come and go, and no ice age will ensue.

David Gould says:
August 22, 2010 at 9:55 pm
If the argument was that CO2 was the only driver of global temperature, the ups, downs and flatlines would show that argument to be false. But, given that that is not the argument …
_____
Thank you David for a wee bit of….Perspective!

To be quite blunt, I don’t think we have a clue if temps are even up over the last 35 years. After pouring over the Surface Station project I have very serious doubts that the temperature record is anywhere close to accurate. With every possible error biased to the upside I’m amazed that temps are down over the past 10 years. Until we actually figure out how to record a temperature accurately I don’t think we can say much of anything about temperature trends.

Other forcings play a role besides CO2, and prior to 1980 it’s generally agreed in the climate community that sulfates balanced CO2. Hence Tamino’s comment about the “modern warming period starting in 1975”. Also, don’t fall into a trap of expecting CO2 and temperature to rise in lock step in any case… it’s a slowly changing secular forcing, and there are other, natural sources of climactic variability that over any short period will tend to overwhelm this slowly changing secular forcing.
Steve says that “The practice of good science tells us to look for a hypothesis which can explain both similar warming periods.” Yes, the simplest reasonable hypothesis is that total forcings increased for both periods, causing net warming. With a complex system, it’s not reasonable to assume all but one forcing is constant over a both periods. Regarding the similar values… coincidence happens in science all of the time, it’s why we do more than two tests in experimental measurements before making our conclusions.

Warren Meyer of climate-skeptic.com deserves some credit, since he has pointed this out repeatedly. (For example, http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2010/03/oh-maybe-ocean-occilations-are-important.html)
The IPCC says: “Modelling studies are also in moderately good agreement with observations during the first half of the 20th century…” “Moderately good agreement” means that climate models totally fail to reproduce the temperature peak around 1940. Actually, the diagram of models vs. temperature is quite revealing if you have an ounce or two of skepticism.
In other words, the IPCC has basically glossed over this problem.

Tim L says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:06 pmThe interesting thing is how are we flat lining for 10 years? 2000 to 2010?
faulty data? uhi? momentum is higher? solar activity was higher? 6-10 year lag?
I wouldn’t know all the reasons but flat temps have happened beforehttp://img837.imageshack.us/img837/1992/zzznature06982f12crop.jpg

Or perhaps mid seventies was just about the time, ‘all the weather stations migrated south’ or the ‘pump up the volume’ really took off.
Reading Ross McKitrick demolition of GHCN records was an eye opener and I don’t think that what any of these guys say, argues over, or for that matter does – I ain’t going to believe it.
La Nina, coming (now here), ENSO fading….all reasons to kick this into where it belongs, file under – “nothing to see here.”
Its all about the ocean currents, stoopid – not forgetting, big yellow thing (fusion reactor) in the sky.

Giss model E forcings suggest that the warming between 1910 and 1940 was caused by roughly equal parts of increase in solar activity, increase in Co2, and reduction in aerosols (i.e. volcanos early in the period, and an increase to no volcanos late in the period).

Warmists are in trap, concerning the 1910-1940 warming. It can not be caused by CO2, so they have to admit natural causes, like ramp up in the sun activity from 1910 minimum. But at the same time, they claim the sun has very low effect on temperatures, where mechanically applying the 0.1% fluctuation in TSI. Cooling period 1940-1975 is a problem as well, though they managed to erase it from global datasets, but it appears pronounced in NH record.
“Global” datasets stink. We do not know much about southern half of the globe – prior 1950 – and by data infilling, “decreasing the 1940 blob by 0.15 deg C”, statistical plays with buckets, station cherry-picking, manufacturing trends without much data in tropics and central Asia they almost managed to erase the cooling period and inflated the post-1975 warming trend. For HadSST2 dataset alone, there is an inexplicable step increase of global SST by 0.1 deg C since 1998, which makes another +0.07 deg C for global HadCRUT.
Northern extratropics have the best coverage history and Atlantic has the most data since 1900. I take this as UHI-free NH temperature proxy any day.http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/ihadsst2_280-360E_0-90N_na.png

The HADCRUT graph shown in the lead article is rather misleading. They use a 21-year moving simplified Gaussian smoothing average, (10 years each side of the target year), which means that there is no actual data available for determining it over the final 10 years, and the algorithm should thus stop short at 1999. However, someone has extended the black line in a way presumably that they would like to see it go. On the other hand, the following modified image seems to be a better averaging to me, as an eyeball job, and it then looks somewhat similar to the plateau around 1940! Oh dear!http://www.flickr.com/photos/26175880@N05/4919342326/

Okay Goddard, Stop saying 1998 was the warming globally. We both know that the analysis by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) found warming has been higher than that shown by HadCRUT. So did you choose the dataset which fit your answer Goddard? Why didn’t you put up GISS or NOAA?http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091218b.html
Also lets consider some things. There was a rapidly increasing solar activity during the early century warming yet there is not now? Also remember that volcanic activity was lower during the early century but volcanic activity has been relatively high even into the 21st century. Lets also consider some things. When Mosher and them put together all their global temperature analyses, the majority of them found 1998 to not be the warmest:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/13/calculating-global-temperature/
You are also completely ignoring the inertia and time-lag of CO2 induced warming.

A proposal: Heat output from the sun has been increasing since around 1700 to which we have added significantly and increasingly in the latter third or so, by our production of energy. Both increases have lead to a general warming of the planet (the Maunder Minimum was not local to Europe) and the conditions we enjoy today.
From figures for worldwide consumption of all energy sources other than kinetic & solar, 14 Terajoules per second are added to the heat input of our planet, at or around surface level: all energy produced eventually and quickly decays to heat.
This man-made production of energy equates to 0.03 W/m2 for every m2 of surface or a 0.03% increase over the input of the sun. A 1% increase in solar irradiative change produces a climate forcing of 0.24 W/m2. From that we can calculate that a forcing of 0.03 W/m2 is a solar irradiative increase equivalent of 0.125%.
From the Maunder Minimum to now, a 0.25% increase in solar output has occurred. The Maunder Minimum coincided with the Little Ice Age and since which time temperatures have been generally meandering upwards with a coincident 0.25% increase in solar output. Mankind’s current addition to forcing of 0.125% is half of that difference and has been added in annual increasing amounts, mostly during the latter third of the period since 1715. Inaccurate temperature analysis & unproven theories on atmospheric CO2 can be set aside.

Anyways, tamino already caught you cherry picking and i’m sure he will be dealing with this soon enough. Too bad your loyal viewers didn’t see you get completely proven wrong at taminos twice now in the last two weeks… He proved you wrong and your response was something about the hockey stick being wrong. Nothing to do with the topic of conversation but hey, you had to say something right?

Michael Hauber says: “Giss model E forcings suggest that the warming between 1910 and 1940 was caused by roughly equal parts of increase in solar activity, increase in Co2, and reduction in aerosols (i.e. volcanos early in the period, and an increase to no volcanos late in the period).”
Model forcings are not data and thus can’t ‘suggest’ anything. They can only assume.

@Carrick says: August 22, 2010 at 10:44 pm
“Other forcings play a role besides CO2, and prior to 1980 it’s generally agreed in the climate community that sulfates balanced CO2.”
Hmmmm.
I think you’ll find that it is “generally agreed in the climate community” that they need to dream up much better excuses and “adjustments”.
Otherwise the whole BigSnakeOil cAGW scam will go down the drain and they’ll have to start looking for another job.

I think my position that the trends are not unexplainable by weather variations is still sound. Averaging is supposed to remove the variation. I remain unconvinced. I think selective averaging may remove some variations. I think that averaging techniques are not representative of the energy in the system. If you have a 24 hour period, and 23 of 24 hours are 30, and one is 50 you have an average of 40 the way that average is currently derived. This is a problem because the average should have been 30.833_.
Not to mention that the temperatures derived before the modern era may not have registered temperatures caught by today’s thermometers because of the ability of today’s thermos to catch temperatures more quickly than older temperatures. The highs may have been higher, the lows may have been lower. That data, imho, can’t be compared.

David Gould 9:55 pm,
“…..If the argument was that CO2 was the only driver of global temperature, the ups, downs and flatlines would show that argument to be false. But, given that that is not the argument …”
The behavior of the hopelessly credulous catastrophic AGW zealots suggests to me that they do indeed believe that CO2 is the only driver of, not only the global temperature, but the global climate, droughts, hurricanes, floods, disease, earthquakes, tsunamis…..http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
…..and who can blame them.
The ‘The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’, the IPCC, has unequivocally stated: Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (over 90%) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations.
If over 50% of the alleged warming since 1950 is due to human GHGs, it doesn’t leave room for much else.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Radiative-forcings.svg

Dagfinn says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:58 pm
It’s all in the language. IPCC remarks that discrepancies between satellite data & surface based observations have largely been resolved. This is such wishy-washy guff & Meta speak meaning that they cannot resolve such discrepancies (admitting there are more than one such difference at least) so they just say they have, easy peasy!

Tamino was kind enough to calculate the different CO2 forcings for the two periods. His boundary dates are slightly different, but not so much that they would change the essentials: for the first period .25 w/m^2, for the second 2 w/m^2.
The extra 1.75 w/m^2 has had to go somewhere, or come from somewhere. Aerosols are mentioned,but I have asked on Open Mind if there are any measured aerosol levels which cover the preiods concerned without a taker.
It can’t be sun variations as the received wisdom is that the sun’s variation is insufficient. This leaves cloud and or aerosols from industry and volcanoes. Or albedo change I suppose.
Is there data (yes, yes, I know, it’s a collective noun in layman speech) about variation in aerosols? Not modelled ‘data’, real data. TIA.
JF

ATTN: All
RE: Climate Cycles: What the Russians say.
The English translation of the monograph “Cyclic Climate Changes and Fish Productivity” by L.B. Klayashtorin and A. Lyubushin can be dowloaded for free from:http://alexeylybushin.narod.ru/Climate_Changes_and_Fish_Productivity.pdf?
This book is 224 pages and the Russian addition was published 2005. The English edition was published in 2007. The literature is covered through 2004 with a few references in 2005.
In the first two chapters, they show the results of their analyses of numerous time series of data related to climate such as air temperature, ocean oscillation indices, tree ring and sediment proxies, fish catches, etc.. They found that the earth has a climate cycle of warm and cool phases with periodicity of 50-70 years with an average of 60 years which has a 30 year cool phase and 3o year warm phase.
Since the begining of the instumental record of reliable temperature data in 1880, the cool phases were 1880=1910 and 194o-1970 , and the warm phases were 1910=1940 and 1970-2000. They predict that 2000-2030 will be a cool phase.
In Fig 2.22 (p 52) and Table 2 (p 53), they show that increasing world fuel consumption has no effect on fluctulating gobal temperature anomalies.
In Chapters 3-6 have detailed analyses of the influence of various aspects of climate cylcles on fish populations and catches in the world’s major fisheries.

Carrick says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Other forcings play a role besides CO2, and prior to 1980 it’s generally agreed in the climate community that sulfates balanced CO2.
I’m not sure that this is “generally agreed” since the evidence suggests that the “sulfate” effect was not a factor in the 1945-1975 cooling (or non-warming). The effect of sulfate (or sulphate) aerosols is regionally specific, i.e. the majority of them are washed out of the atmosphere within a few weeks. Productions of aerosols was predominantly limited to the mid latitude bands in the NH.
However, the GISS temperature record for the 1945-75 period is characterised by sharp cooling (~1 deg) in the arctic – well away from the industrialised regions. Fuurthermore any aerosols that did make it to the arctic would have caused warming not cooling via the effect of Arctic Haze . See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_haze which cites a numbe rof studies which detail the warming effect of aerosols in the arctic including this “According to Tim Garrett, an assistant professor of meteorology at the University of Utah, mid-latitude cities contribute pollution to the Arctic, and it mixes with thin clouds, allowing them to trap heat more easily. Garrett was involved in the study of Arctic haze at the university. The study found that during the dark Arctic winter, when there is no precipitation to wash out pollution, the effects are strongest, because pollutants can warm the environment up to three degrees Fahrenheit
While, between 1945 and 1975, the arctic was cooling dramatically the NH mid latitude regions were experiencign a very modest cooling. There was little or no difference between heavily industrialised regions and rural regions.
It does seem likely that cyclical factors (e.g. ocean oscillations) have influenced 20th century climate and probably the 19th century climate as well, but there is also an underlying warming trend not connected with the ‘cycles’, e.g. 1995-2005 is ~0.4 deg warmer than 1935-45. If we assume that the residual (non-cyclical) increase is due to ~1 w/m2 forcing from enhanced ghgs over that period it implies a temperature increase of 1-1.5 deg C for a doubling of CO2.

Robert says:
August 23, 2010 at 12:16 am
“Okay Goddard,”
That’s Mr.Goddard to you. You impress no one and diminish your argument by your rudeness. Did your mother not teach you the most basic of manners?

Carrick says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:44 pm
Other forcings play a role besides CO2, and prior to 1980 it’s generally agreed in the climate community that sulfates balanced CO2. Hence Tamino’s comment about the “modern warming period starting in 1975″.
Little questionairre:
Sulphates hid the warming prior to 1975, 1980.
CO2 is not a unique drover but adds to the total forcings leading to eventual tipping point(s).
Post 1980 warming was caused by ______________________________ ?
Post 1998 cooling was caused by ______________________________ ?
Bonus: 1910-1940 warming was caused by _________________________ ?

It is also interesting to overlay an historical comparision of the course of the Climate Science debate. With the new spectrum data on greenhouse gases in the 1920s and 30s, the CO2-forcing theory (mainly due to volcanism) for geological climate change collapsed.
Then along came Callendar in 1938 (and later papers) proposing that the observed warming from the late 19th cent through the 1940s was in a large part caused by fossil fuel emissions. The establishment climate scientists gave this outsider a hearing (even asked him to join their club!) but their rounded criticism of his theory is as familiar to us today and it remain valid.
Then came the cooling of the 60s and 70s and the Ice Age scare prompted by scientists (not just Schneider). And then the warming in the 1980s, and once again the AGW argument (lead by the powerful science-advocacy of Hansen and Schneider etc).
What is curious for the sceptic is the way the Alarmist attempt to deal with the problem of Callendar. On the one hand he is a hero for first making a proper case of AGW, but on the other hand giving attention to him causes problems. For, since 1995, the IPCC etc have held to the claim that AGW only kicked in after the 1970s cooling. If they gave an earlier date causes attention this would drawn to climate cycles, but also to Callendar’s response in the last cycle. On the post 1970s argument, they have to say that Callendar was wrong…and that his critics were right…and yet that today’s critics making the same points are wrong.
With the onset of the harsh winters of the early 1960s (especially 1963), Callendar himself was as aware as any that it was difficult to sustain a theory of warming when it felt like the warming had stops. The same thing is happening right now, but there is so much more momentum. What will happen this time is anybody’s guess — but it sure wont collapse as easily and quietly as it did last time.

I thought the IPCC position that changes in TSI were responsible for the 1910 – 1940 warming had been discredited.
I’m sure Leif Svalgaard pointed out that the current understanding of TSI variation is that it changes much less than previously supposed (variously and separately demonstrated by Wang, Preminger, Kriv and Svalgaard).
The IPCC based its case on an obsolete paper by Hoyt and Schatten (1993). Reference may be made to more recent work by Lean, also erroneously showing increasing TSI from ~1900 to ~1940. I think this was the case in TAR at any rate, and AR4 seems to gloss over the whole thing with words to the effect that the role of TSI may not be as large as previously thought.
My understanding is that the cause of the 1910 – 1940 warming is NOT known.
Dominic

All these temperature graphs are total crap, the weather stations measure the micro climate around them, if they are situated at airports they are measuring the temperature of the tarmac at the airport, in cities they measure the temperature of the buildings. There are hundreds of pristine rural stations with long records world wide that can be used to verify the accuracy of this suspect warming, ever wonder why the warmers dont want to go down that road. If you are trying to measure the temperature of the natural environment, you dont go to an airport or a city to do that.

If 300-310 ppm caused a 0.5C increase, and 340-390 ppm caused a 0.5C increase, and the effect of CO2 concentration is known to be logarithmic, it shouldn’t be too hard (for someone cleverer than me) to fit a curve to these numbers, and so work out what additional increase is required for the IPCC’s worst-case 7C increase over the next century.
I suspect the required increase might be quite high.

Could we call this La Nina alarmism? Here in Denver, where we were just one degree shy of a record high for August 22, at 97F, the only thing I saw on people’s faces were some nice suntans, and smiling neighbor kids playing in their pool. La Nina will come and go, and no ice age will ensue.

Please post to let us know how Tuesday goes. Yesterday’s high was 12 F above average, Tuesday is forecasted about -18 F above average.
If you don’t like the weather in Colorado, wait a few hours…it’ll change.
-Scott

David Gould,
If you took a murder case to grand jury, and your only evidence was that your suspect was in the same city at the same time – it wouldn’t get very far.
Unless you were in Fort Collins, where Tim Masters spent ten years in jail for a murder with zero physical evidence linking him to the crime.http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/29/tim.masters.police.perjury/index.html

Likewise the ~1940 to 1977 cooling – see John Finn’s important comment above (Aug 23 1:57 am). It DOES NOT appear to have been aerosols, as the consensus would have it. Too small, too local and no arctic haze to warm the pole.
C20th climate change has not been explained.
Dominic

Tamino was kind enough to calculate the different CO2 forcings for the two periods. His boundary dates are slightly different, but not so much that they would change the essentials: for the first period .25 w/m^2, for the second 2 w/m^2.
The extra 1.75 w/m^2 has had to go somewhere, or come from somewhere. Aerosols are mentioned,but I have asked on Open Mind if there are any measured aerosol levels which cover the preiods concerned without a taker.
It can’t be sun variations as the received wisdom is that the sun’s variation is insufficient. This leaves cloud and or aerosols from industry and volcanoes. Or albedo change I suppose.
Is there data (yes, yes, I know, it’s a collective noun in layman speech) about variation in aerosols? Not modelled ‘data’, real data. TIA.
JF

To my knowledge, no one cared about aerosols back then. They started caring after the London smog episode of 1952 killed a bunch of people. Thus, I doubt anyone can make good estimates of aerosols from back then, and there likely isn’t any sort of data that’s even close to useful.
In general, human-caused aerosols probably went down per person as we got cleaner/more efficient, but at the same time the population went up, so…?
-Scott

Sorry folks, whenever I see one of these temperature graphs, I ask myself, “is this the original raw data, or the adjusted, homogenised, value-added data?”.
Sorry, but sometimes my BS indicators are stretched a little too far

son of mulder,
I also saw the butterfly wings flap and failed to understand the significance of the event. The threat of nuclear winter and the doomsayers forecasting an ice age made it hard to sift the chaff from the wheat. Chaos theory { not Maxwells nemesis } saw the beginning of understanding in chaotic systems. Thus far however the mainstream scientific endeavour has failed to incorporate this basic universal mathematics, that powers all of creation. The non linear equations that ultimately will give sense to climate are way beyond the linear thinking of the AGW scientists.
Coterie consensus in science is costing billions and the results are BS. It is not only climate science that is degraded, the standard model of the universe and quantum physics have gone nowhere, except for more complications and new explanations. They also will not accept new ideas. Savour your cherries, for real science has always lagged the accepted truth, some times for centuries, we can hope that this endeavour of AGW can be banished, some-what more quickly. Wayne

David Gould says:
August 23, 2010 at 1:13 am
Stevengoddard,
“So you are saying that unless I know who killed person A, I cannot possibly know who killed person B? I think that there might be something in error about that logic …”
The only thing posting this kind of nonsense brings are concerned smiles. Think it through prior to posting!

I’m not convinced there’s anything significant here (other than to show, yet again, the worthlessness of the whole AGW pseudo-theory), because the similarity in slope is appearing in what is already a dataset deliberately fudged to show as close to a continually rising trend as its inventors can manage. It’s not even a coincidence; it’s an artefact. If you look at the original data – preferably using old printed literature which can’t be edited away – the slopes do not really match; the earlier period had a steeper rise (and bigger subsequent fall) and the later period should have had a shallower rise. On the other hand, the absolute temperatures were a lot closer.

Robert,
Tamino (as usual) missed the point of my hockey stick argument. If the hockey stick was an accurate representation of temperature trends, it would be impossible to find a cooling trend from 1930 – or any other date in the past.
It is basic math, but he diverted attention with his sociological straw man argument.

David Gould says:
August 22, 2010 at 9:55 pmIf the argument was that CO2 was the only driver of global temperature, the ups, downs and flatlines would show that argument to be false. But, given that that is not the argument …
So, sometimes C02 forces the temperatures up, and sometimes it doesn’t. Got it.

‘David Gould says:
August 23, 2010 at 1:13 am
Stevengoddard,
So you are saying that unless I know who killed person A, I cannot possibly know who killed person B? I think that there might be something in error about that logic …”
True, but if the only wounds on Person A and Person B are gunshot wounds to the head, by what logic would you conclude A had been shot to death but B must have been stabbed to death?

Michael Hauber says:
August 22, 2010 at 11:37 pm
“Giss model E forcings suggest that the warming between 1910 and 1940 was caused by roughly equal parts of increase in solar activity, increase in Co2, and reduction in aerosols (i.e. volcanos early in the period, and an increase to no volcanos late in the period).”
At least choose a GOOD climate model to base your conclusions on…no one knows (or cares to show) what model E is solving…

Yes, the simplest reasonable hypothesis is that total forcings increased for both periods, causing net warming.
The simplest reasonable hypothesis might be that the up-down-up is an artifact in the data.

John: August 23, 2010 at 5:23 amTrue, but if the only wounds on Person A and Person B are gunshot wounds to the head, by what logic would you conclude A had been shot to death but B must have been stabbed to death?
Whoa! A and B are dead? Geez, I had breakfast with them just last Monday!
When’s the funeral? I’ll have to send flowers…

Basically, the climate models use the big three other forcings to try to match up to the record (in addition to adjusting the record to match up to the theory).
Aerosols is just guesstimated. Volcanic impact is overstated. The latest solar forcing estimates say it is has not changed much at all (at least the solar minimums haven’t).
Since 1998 as well, these big three are flat (and zero in the case of volcanoes).
The math really only works if one assumes there are, indeed, natural cycles in the climate AND the GHG impact is less than assumed. Two things climate science works very hard to avoid coming to grips with. The current La Nina will make this avoidance even more awkward.

pat said:“The stupidity of this is beyond belief. How can the global average always be under the average until Warmists decide it is over? This is not science. It is not real. It is some sort of game.”
The zero anomaly line isn’t an average for the entire ‘data’ period. The basis period which anomalies are compared to is 1961-1990.
Assume the CO2 effect is true. If 10ppm 1910-1940 caused a 0.5C increase and another 50ppm caused the 1975-2000 0.5C increase, another 0.5C increase would require how much more CO2? 250ppm?

Paul Birch,
Do you know where all the original data might be catalogued? Is it in one place, or would one have to search different databases maintained by various nations and their weather services? Robuk brought up the subject of using rural, pristine databases to check the accuracy of the temperature record. Could such a thing even be possible?

As I look around, life goes on just as I remember it from previous years, and I remember well before 1975. Reading information and debate on the topic of MMGW, all I can detect is a detachment from reality: where are the changes happening? And don’t say in the temperature records, I mean where I can go and look and see the effect. Any examples, not could-be & might-be but something tangible? Just asking.

I think that everyone knows that AGW is an acronym for “Anthropogenic Global Warming,” as it is often used in this blog to describe a theory of climate change. After reading many of these posts, ABC or “Anything But Carbon” might be a good fit to define this site’s opposing view.

I think it urbane to point out (again) that Skeptics do not argue that an increase in CO2 would not have 0% affect on the climate, rather that the affect of said increase is no where near catastrophic in nature and that the increase in temperature over short periods of time ( anything less than a couple centuries ) is in many ways meaningless as there is too much natural ‘noise’ to be of any use.
Add to this that the only thing that people talk about in reference to Global Warming is doom and gloom and you have skeptics of such prophesying ( cause that is what it is ) sitting back and trying to separate the facts from the fiction.
For instance when it comes to an increase of Carbon Dioxide are there no beneficial affects? Of course there are. An increase in temperature? No Beneficial affects? Once again of course there is. But that is not what we hear over and over again from those studying the phenomenon.
I enjoy this site because it questions and this is a perfectly valid question that Steve Goddard has brought to the fore. Explain the warming in other time periods. The truth is that you can’t easily do so…. In fact some of the hypothesis that I have heard trying to down play this really cause more questions then answers.
Being able to point to one place and say it was caused by nature and another and say it was caused by man without being able to really justify the first and simple discounting the second as possibly being natural is in my mind the ravings of a fanatic with an agenda. Just as not being able to suggest good along with ill when it comes to increased CO2 and Global temperatures causes me to question if people are able to think through the Global Warming Debate or are trapped within their own ignorance.
Regardless of the answer I believe that CO2 does contribute to a warmer world ( though how much warmer… I know not ) Just as I believe CO2 contributes to a greener world ( and that I do know the answer to because it has been fairly well documented what an increase in CO2 does to plants )

R. Gates says:
August 22, 2010 at 10:28 pm
_____
Could we call this La Nina alarmism? Here in Denver, where we were just one degree shy of a record high for August 22, at 97F, the only thing I saw on people’s faces were some nice suntans, and smiling neighbor kids playing in their pool. La Nina will come and go, and no ice age will ensue.

Here in Western Washington we’ve been well below average all Spring and Summer. Apart from a literal handful of hot days, 60s and low 70s has been the norm. I had to wear a sweatshirt while mowing my lawn yesterday, since it didn’t hit 70f. There’s no global anything going on, except hysteria, in both directions.
However, an ice age will come eventually, unless the configuration of the continents drastically changes, or the sun suddenly puts out significantly more energy, or drastic orbital changes occur…

David Gould says:
August 23, 2010 at 1:13 am
Stevengoddard,
“So you are saying that unless I know who killed person A, I cannot possibly know who killed person B? I think that there might be something in error about that logic …”
Well some people have already shot your analogy, but I have a different interpretation.
We know person A and B were killed using the exact same M.O. (ie +0.5 degrees warming). We suspect that person C killed B (ie. CO2 caused the 1975 warming). We know C could not have killed A cause he has a bulletproof alibi (ie CO2 was much lower in 1910).
Does that mean we arrest C and we have any kind of chance of a conviction? I suspect any decent lawyer would win such a case. Maybe we should find who killed A and see if he had any reason to kill B also.

@GeoFlynx I doubt that any serious scientists on this site will disagree that an increase in carbon dioxide does give you a net increase in temperature. The question is the magnitude of the forcing. The models I have examined give you a change of 0.00125 to 0.00250 degrees C per ppm with a decreasing effect as the CO2 concentration increases (logarithmic). The question is several fold. First, has there been much real change since the 30s in rural temperatures. The answer I get is very little. The urban heat islands have nothing to do with CO2 and have indeed warmed. Secondly, the question is one of the honesty of the brokers in this game. From my experience, most of them are rent-seekers who are trying to justify their windmills, solar panels, etc. on the basis of AGW. Thanks but no thanks. I do have a 10KW solar installation and a a full electric car that can go 70 mph, and heat my house by burning sawdust wood pellets, so its not like I am a guy who is opposed to alternative energy. I am just opposed to academic dishonesty.

Here is my version of the ultimate cherry picking endeavor. Pick only ENSO neutral years to study land temperature. Given that there is a lag for tropical SST conditions to affect extra-tropical land temperatures, it would be worth while to run several temperature series from the data sets available, one right on neutral conditions, and a set that is delayed by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, etc. Consider nothing else for this run. Then do the same for the various Atlantic Oscillation System years, and PDO years. In other words, work only with temperature series not affected by natural variation outside neutral and the lag affects already well known. Averaging through positive and negative phases plus their lags ruins the data for CO2 global warming purposes.

GeoFlynx says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:08 amI think that everyone knows that AGW is an acronym for “Anthropogenic Global Warming,” as it is often used in this blog to describe a theory of climate change. After reading many of these posts, ABC or “Anything But Carbon” might be a good fit to define this site’s opposing view.
Actually, it’s more like APC – Any Possibility Considered. “Carbon” simply hasn’t been shown to have caused much of the recent warming, nor indeed to have been the cause of any warming historically. But, perhaps you have evidence to the contrary.

Scott says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:47 am
re: Julian Flood August 23, 2010 at 1:25 am
quote
Is there data (yes, yes, I know, it’s a collective noun in layman speech) about variation in aerosols? Not modelled ‘data’, real data. TIA.
To my knowledge, no one cared about aerosols back then. They started caring after the London smog episode of 1952 killed a bunch of people. Thus, I doubt anyone can make good estimates of aerosols from back then, and there likely isn’t any sort of data that’s even close to useful.
In general, human-caused aerosols probably went down per person as we got cleaner/more efficient, but at the same time the population went up, so…?
unquote
So without the data the supposition that warming was suppressed by aerosols is opinion, not science. If you gave me carte blanche to tweak the graphs with forcings of plus or minus 1.75w/m^2 between 1910 and 2010 then I suspect I could get a better match with the statistics of petrochemical output vs temperature (to use one example).
JF

“If there is an influence of CO2 in the recent warming, it appears small. And the warming stopped ten years ago, as shown in the HadCRUT graph, despite rapid increases in CO2.”
_________________
I think you’re on to something. We may have reached the point of deminishing returns in the battle with co2 and temp-wise it may not be giving us anymore BTU’s in the future. I also have a sneeky feeling that during the course of glacial periods we don’t have La Ninas and El Ninos but rather El Ninas and La Ninos, know what I mean?

steveta_uk says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:26 am
“If 300-310 ppm caused a 0.5C increase, and 340-390 ppm caused a 0.5C increase, and the effect of CO2 concentration is known to be logarithmic…….I suspect the required increase might be quite high.”
Correct, the IPCC A1F1 assumes enormous CO2 emissions increases. While enough coal actually exists to create those emissions, the fact that the price of coal has more then doubled in most of the world in the last 5 years leaves a question as to whether digging that much coal out of the ground would be economically viable. I.E. At $100/ton for coal nuclear is cheaper, at $400/ton for coal solar panels are cheaper.
The price of a ton of coal delivered on the US Eastern Seaboard has gone from $40/ton in 2005 to more then $80/ton today. The price of a ton of delivered coal in Europe is running right at $100/ton and the price in the Asia Pacific is more then $100/ton.China went from $27/ton in 2002 to $116/ton today. With the exception of the US Midwest(coal in Wyoming sells for $12/ton) if all one cares about is their wallet then building a coal fired electricity plant is financially foolish.

Over what sort of time period?
The climate has been warming on the ~1,500-yr cycle since about 1600 AD. The warming phases of the shorter cycles have had higher average amplitudes than the cooling phases since about 1600 AD. It was the other way around from about 1100 AD to 1600 AD – The cooling phases had higher amplitudes.
The ~1,500-yr cycle is known as the Dansgaard-Oeschger in the upper Pleistocene and as the Bond cycle in the Holocene. It has a variability of ~500 years. It can be as short as 1,000 years or as long as 2,000 years. It had a 15-20C amplitude (in the Northern Hemisphere) in the Pleistocene and a ~2C amplitude in the Holocene.

@Yuba Yollabolly
Because the underlying trend is a rise in global average temperatures. This is suggested to be the ongoing recovery from the LIA.
Roughly speaking, if you look at the trend 1850 – 1950 (when CO2 was still below 300 ppmv and not therefore a significant component of the various temperature forcings), you get +0.5C per century.
Extend that trend from 1950 – present and plot the sine of ~30yr warming and cooling periods riding up the slope and you have your answer. The amplitude of the cool phases is reduced by the rising underlying trend.
Dominic

I don’t have time right now, but it would be interesting to regress annual CRUTEMP on CO2 (or log CO2), with a simple Santer/Bartlett AR(1) se adjustment. The correlation is obviously positive, but it won’t be nearly as significant as CRUTEMP on time, since CO2 is pretty flat before 1950, while CRUTEMP has the Goddard Warming Spell.

Hi David Middleton, thank you for your reply.
Actually I was thinking since the industrial revolution – roughly the period of the main graphs (above).
Although the timing would be reasonable for a Bond event…aren’t Bond events cooling events?
Thanks

@bobbyj0708 says August 22, 2010 at 10:37 pm:
To be quite blunt, I don’t think we have a clue if temps are even up over the last 35 years. After pouring over the Surface Station project I have very serious doubts that the temperature record is anywhere close to accurate. With every possible error biased to the upside I’m amazed that temps are down over the past 10 years. Until we actually figure out how to record a temperature accurately I don’t think we can say much of anything about temperature trends.

I completely agree. What is real? Raw instrument data is not adequate, by itself. DOES need to be adjusted, to account for TOB changes. UHI does absolutely need to be adjusted for – but not with one global adjustment; each station needs to have its own (too much work? tough). Proxies DO need to be homogenized, so that they can be assembled together sensibly. Tree rings DO need to have the temperature factor identified and isolated, apart from humidity and other local conditions. Ice cores need to have their time element de-subjectified.
Climatology is a terribly new science, with records that only go back a short time. Proxies have too many assumptions underlying them for long-term past histories to be looked at as predictors of the future. M & W 2010 spells this latter out clearly.
I look at GHCN station records and realize how SHORT a record we have – even the long term ones.
It is simply too new of a science and too short a record to be able to claim what they have claimed. And that is all exacerbated by the assumptions, data tainted by improper instrument locations, data left out, dying off of 80% of the world’s met stations, lack of inclusion of statisticians, and poor methodologies. Those are a LOT of weaknesses in the work done thus far.
The EFFORT to compile globally averaged temps going back any number of years is an admirable one – for information purposes. I give Mann and others a lot of credit for having done so. But any conclusions AT THIS TIME need to be – at best – tentative. The data and methodologies need to be proven out much MUCH more, over time. And to extrapolate from the hodge podge that exists? It’s basically just laughable. And anyone BELIEVING such extrapolations cannot possibly be using the left side of their brains.

Yuba says:
Hasn’t the general trend for the last 10ky has been one of cooling?
Yes, but you are looking at the big picture. The recent past (~1200 years BP) has seen both warming and cooling episodes. As I suspect you are perfectly well aware.
Dominic

@ Yuba
Yuba says:
Hasn’t the general trend for the last 10ky has been one of cooling?
Yes, but you are looking at the big picture. The recent past (~1200 years BP) has seen both warming and cooling episodes. As I suspect you are perfectly well aware.
But please don’t feel obliged to take my word for it. Here’s what Keith Briffa thinks:
Briffa: 22 September 1999: 938018124
‘I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. [-] I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched 1000 years ago. I do not believe that global mean annual temperatures have simply cooled progressively over thousands of years as Mike [Michael Mann] appears to and I contend that there is strong evidence for major changes in climate over the Holocene (not Milankovich) [sic] that require explanation and that could represent part of the current or future background variability of our climate.’
(I don’t comment here enough to know whether the link will land me in trouble?)
Source: http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=136&filename=938018124.txt

Yuba Yollabolly says:
August 23, 2010 at 10:45 am
Hi David Middleton, thank you for your reply.
Actually I was thinking since the industrial revolution – roughly the period of the main graphs (above).
Although the timing would be reasonable for a Bond event…aren’t Bond events cooling events?
Thanks

The Bond events are episodes of sharp cooling interpreted from periodic increases in the volume of ice-rafted sediment in North Atlantic cores.
Each cooling event is followed by a warm-up. The last Bond event was around 1600 AD. This is also coincident with the coldest part of the LIA on Moberg’s NH reconstruction, Alley’s d18O ice core temp’s for Central Greenland and Keigwin’s d18O temps from forams in the Sargasso Sea.
We’ve been warming on that ~1,500-yr cycle since 1600. There is a roughly 60-yr cycle “riding” on the 1,500-yr cycle. As long as we are on the “up slope” of the 1,500-yr cycle, the 30-yr warming phases of the 60-yr cycle will generally warm more than the 30-yr cooling phases will cool.
We could be in the warming phase of the 1,500-yr cycle for the next 100 to 900 years. Although Alley’s ice core temperatures seem to have an 800-yr cycle with about a 2C amplitude. If that cycle is meaningful, we are very close to the end of the Modern Warming.GISP2 w/ HadCRUT3 3kya

Yuba Yollabolly says:
August 23, 2010 at 10:52 am
BBD-
Hasn’t the general trend for the last 10ky has been one of cooling?
Thanks

Yes and it still is… At least in the Northern Hemisphere.
I scaled the HadCRUT3 NH temp’s to Alley’s Greenland ice core temp’s here:GISP2 w/ HadCRUT3 10kya
And to Keigwin’s Sargasso Sea temp’s here:Sargasso w/ HadCRUT3

Robuk says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:20 am
“All these temperature graphs are total crap, the weather stations measure the micro climate around them, if they are situated at airports they are measuring the temperature of the tarmac at the airport, in cities they measure the temperature of the buildings. There are hundreds of pristine rural stations with long records world wide that can be used to verify the accuracy of this suspect warming, ever wonder why the warmers dont want to go down that road. If you are trying to measure the temperature of the natural environment, you dont go to an airport or a city to do that.”
Go to the late John-Daly’s website “Still Waiting for Greenhouse” at:http://www.John-Daly.com.
On the home page scroll down and click on “Station Temperature Data”. There you can find many temperature-time plots from mostly rual ( i.e, remote) weather stations from all over the world.
In particular, check out the plots for Death Valley and other desert locations such the stations in Utah and Alice Springs, Australia.
The seasonal plots for Death Valley are almost flat since 1922. Thus CO2 had no influence on warming local air at the Furnance Creek weather station which is about 280 ft below sea level. Death Valley is a good field site to test the AGW hypothesis because the are usually no day or night time clouds and little water vapor to effect temperature.
Analysis of monthly Tmax and Tmin would probably show even flatter time-temperature plots since there would be less weather noise.

Harold, Death Valley thermometer data would be good ones to check. Death Valley is less directly and immediately affected by oceanic inputs. However, the juxtaposition of the jet stream can cause weird weather once in a while in that place. Fortunately, the weird weather is so rare that it does not significantly change the average. Still, I would look at oceanic/atmospheric neutral years as the best measure/extent of CO2 AGW.

I wonder why CO2 stabilized during the period of WW2 even though we know that industry ramped up during this time, massive fires on a global scale were around, massive amounts of dust and debris sent up in to the atmosphere….. yet CO2 stabilized?
Interesting.

J. Knight says:
August 23, 2010 at 6:57 am
“Paul Birch,Do you know where all the original data might be catalogued? Is it in one place, or would one have to search different databases maintained by various nations and their weather services? Robuk brought up the subject of using rural, pristine databases to check the accuracy of the temperature record. Could such a thing even be possible?”
I think my point was that once the subject has become politicised (as climatology after the late seventies) no database is trustworthy any more; once it’s on a computer, it can be altered, and the reader has no way of knowing what has been done to it. He can only trust that somebody is telling the truth. The AGW crowd certainly aren’t. But how can he be certain that the skeptics aren’t lying too? The only way to be sure would be to look at the original hand-written readings, on the paper met forms or lab notebooks. So, yes, somebody could perhaps trawl through the old records and recompile a sound history. Yet quis custodiet custodes? Nevertheless, one can also use the temperature charts from old books and academic publications, stored in public reference libraries, or one’s own personal library. Those are still reliable – they may not be perfect, but they have not been deliberately biased or manipulated. Remember, though, once the document has been scanned onto a computer, it can be altered; even facsimiles are not completely secure.

@ Harold Pierce Jr says:
August 23, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Robuk says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:20 am
“All these temperature graphs are total crap, the weather stations measure the micro climate around them, if they are situated at airports they are measuring the temperature of the tarmac at the airport, in cities they measure the temperature of the buildings. There are hundreds of pristine rural stations with long records world wide that can be used to verify the accuracy of this suspect warming, ever wonder why the warmers dont want to go down that road. If you are trying to measure the temperature of the natural environment, you dont go to an airport or a city to do that.”

Right. It is an easy enough thing to do. Determine the slope/increase for each one’s linear regression. Break all the stations into population ranges. Also have a separate category for airports, possibly broken into population center size, also.
Then simply average the increase in each group.
If the cities and large airports don’t show the most rise, I am a monkey’s uncle. Rural will have the lowest slope.
But I will make this argument, also:If there is a GLOBAL warming, then that should show up in the rural locations. If it does not, then it isn’t global – it is only local, with the cities and airports being the “arm” places. “Global warming” would mean that the warm spots have warmed up all the locations to some degree. The argument is that it is global, meaning “it” has warmed up all over the place – allowing for local variations – therefore the rural stations’ average slope should be the true warming slope.
Dispersal in the short term will show up as a cooling toward the rural spots, with the rural being the coldest. However, over the long term, it will all have evened out, except for steep isotherms in the vicinity of the warm locations. THE RURAL – AND ONLY THE RURAL – IS THE TRUE “GLOBAL WARMING” LEVEL. Taking measurements anywhere but rural makes no sense.

Pamela Gray says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:45 am
Here is my version of the ultimate cherry picking endeavor. Pick only ENSO neutral years to study land temperature. Given that there is a lag for tropical SST conditions to affect extra-tropical land temperatures, it would be worth while to run several temperature series from the data sets available, one right on neutral conditions, and a set that is delayed by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 years, etc. Consider nothing else for this run. Then do the same for the various Atlantic Oscillation System years, and PDO years. In other words, work only with temperature series not affected by natural variation outside neutral and the lag affects already well known. Averaging through positive and negative phases plus their lags ruins the data for CO2 global warming purposes.

Pamela –
If nothing else, a worthwhile exercise to see what falls out.
Kudos.

Well, this week is climatically the end of summer here in upstate New Hampshire. We have a pretty simple guage for this: we leave our windows open all summer to let the air flow through (see, we don’t cotton to any o’ that new fangled Aich Vee Ay Cee up here in Grouse Hollow), while simultaneously leaving the gas heater set to come on when the temperature goes below 64. When that happens, we shut the doors and windows til it warms up again.
The added benefit of leaving them open all the time is I can be sitting on my La-Z-Boy watching the Red Sox game inside in the shade on my wide screen LCD tv, and shoot tree rats (otherwise known as red squirrels) trying to raid the bird feeders with my high power, noise suppressed, 10x scoped pellet gun. I’ve got some nice snapshots of the local red foxes swinging by the house each day to pick up the squirrel corpses to feed their kits.
This week, the windows and doors have been closed the entire time due to cold. Hence the squirrels have been going gangbusters on the bird feed (they have learned that the sound of the deck door sliding open is the squirrel version of the Jaws theme, and scram as soon as I crack it open).

This might have some application here, as a general guide. Steve is talking about comparing the earlier warming period to the 1975-2000 one.
States represent temperature areas, more or less like 5° or 2° regions do, though the states are not uniform in size (but neither do 5° or 2° regions on a globe, either). And they are to single met stations more or less as climate is to weather.
So, if we look at record temps in light of claims of “highest decade ever” or “hottest period ever”, we should expect to see a large number of record temperatures since 1975. I broke down the record highs for the 50 US states, to see which decades had the most record high temperatures. Weather is not climate, but when looked at statewide and decade-wide, it begins to approach climate.
Let’s see how the 1990s or 2000s stack up:
Period . . . . . State Record Highs
Pre-1900 – 3
1900-1909 – 1
1910-1919 – 4
1920-1929 – 2
1930-1939 – 23
1940-1949 – 0
1950-1959 – 5
1960-1969 – 1
1970-1979 – 2 (both in 1975)
1980-1989 – 2
1990-1999 – 5
2000-2010 – 2
* The first amazing thing that jumps out is those 23 state records in the 1930s.
* The 2000s, supposedly the hottest decade ever, had only 2 state record highs.
* The cool period 1950 thru 1975 had 8 record HIGHs.
* The “hottest” period 1975 thru 2000 had 9 record highs, only 1 more than 1950-1975.
* The entire 1879-1929 period was cooler than ANY later time period. It had 7 record highs.
* The period 1900-1920 was the coldest period of the 20th century. It had 5 record highs.
What does all this mean?
It states very clearly that even in very cool periods record high temperatures occur.
It does not “prove” anything. It is evidence that suggests the 1990s and the 2000s were not the hottest decades. It strongly suggests the 1930s were the hottest decade.

Feet2theFire says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:20 pm
It does not “prove” anything. It is evidence that suggests the 1990s and the 2000s were not the hottest decades. It strongly suggests the 1930s were the hottest decade.
Very, very strongly. However, this is just the US. Do we have any data from other countries on the record highs?

Heh!
So then, the propagandists are wont to blame ‘carbon,’ eh?
Well, how about this: There’s TWICE as much OXYGEN in the CO2 molecule, than there is carbon.
THINK about that.
It’s not carbon that’s causing the ‘warming.’
Rather, it’s the OXYGEN!
QUIT BREATHING, YOU BREATHERS!!!

JR says:
August 23, 2010 at 3:19 pm
Excellent post! I would actually argue that it can be refuted, but it shows how sad the warmists are to just delete your comment rather than to argue against it scientifically.
-Scott

Harold Pierce Jr says:
August 23, 2010 at 12:15 pm
With regards to Death Valley temperatures, shouldn’t it be one of the places MOST affected by CO2 warming? At below sea level, it is under higher pressure and thus (a) higher CO2 partial pressures/concentrations and (b) subject to more collisional broadening of the CO2 absorption bands. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, there is little H2O to absorb IR, so the absolute (and certainly the percentage) effect of CO2 should be more here than in humid areas.
Can anyone confirm my line of reasoning here?
-Scott

In the CRU emails Cook to Mann: ““I think that most researchers in global change research would agree that the emergence of a clear greenhouse forcing signal has really only occurred since after 1970. I am not debating this point, although I do think that there still exists a signficant uncertainty as to the relative contributions of natural and greenhouse forcing to warming during the past 20-30 years at least.””
The IPCC AR4 report indicates the warming prior to 1970 was natural. The two cycles are identical in shape, so they can’t have two different causes (natural before 1970, CO2 since) – see: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Summary.htm for the details on this.

For the cycle fans: Why don’t the cooling phases equal the warming phases?

It is not purely cyclic. It is a cyclic pattern with an overall linear warming of 0.6 deg C per century. As a result, during the warming phase, the cyclic warming and the linear warming components are additive; while during the cooling phase, the cyclic cooling and the linear warming components are subtractive.
This is why “the cooling phases” are no “equal the warming phases”
Look at the following graph:http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png

ATTN: Girma
…lybushin…shoud be…lyubushin
This URL takes you to The Russian website. You then on the URL to download the pdf file.
If you Google the title , you get about 69,000 hits. You should check Gary Sharp’s website as he did the translation.
I wonder how many warmers and climate scientists are aware of this book. Probably a lot.

stevengoddard says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:34 am
GeoFlynx
What do you believe caused the 1910 warming?
GeoFlynx – (sorry for late response) Actually, I do believe you make a good point here – one that forces you to think. Why else would I read this post?

Looks like more hockey stick data…
(Is is just me or does the hockey stick really show how much urbanization and urban heat island has affected temperature data…)

What so many do not realize in the US and Europe, though, is that the growth in urbanization and heat island effect is NOT a developed world thing that caused the jump. What caused the jump is when other countries started urbanizing to a great extent.
Am I saying they should not be ALLOWED to improve their way of life? No. I am just pointing out that WE CITIZENS IN THE US HAVE NO CONTROL OVER ANY OF WHAT THE REST OF THE WORLD DOES. For every hybrid car bought here, 1000 acres are being paved over or built on in China and India. We can economize on carbon till the cows come home and it won’t effect ONE thing in Asia.
This argument holds true whether it is CO2 or land use: We already have laws in place here to minimize our impact on the environment (as long as GW Bush isn’t putting directors into agencies who stop the agencies from doing their jobs). We ARE already cleaning up our act. But that isn’t good enough for warmers. They want to take us back to the 1700s, living in an agrarian society.
That isn’t going to happen.

EVALUATION OF CYCLIC CHANGE OF GLOBA
YEARS AND APPROACHES TO PREDICTION.
L.B. Klyashtorin & A.A. Lyubushin
ABSTRACT
Analysis of the long-term dynamics of World Fuel Consumption (WFC) and the
Global Temperature anomaly (dT) for the last 140 years (1961-2000) shows that
unlike the monotonously and exponentially increasing WFC, the dynamics of
global dT against the background of a linear, age-long trend, undergo quasi-cyclic
fluctuations with about 60 a year period. No true linear correlation has taken place
between the dT and WFC dynamics in the last century.
Spectral analysis of reconstructed temperature for the last 1420 years and
instrumentally measured for the last 140 years global dT shows that dominant
period for its variations for the last 1000 years lies in the 50-60 years interval.
Modeling of roughly 60-years cyclic dT changes suggest that the observed
rise of dT will flatten in the next 5-10 years, and that we might expect a lowering
of dT by nearly 1-0.15°C to the end of the 2020s.
Keywords: global warming, fuel consumption, global climate variations, spectral
analysis, time-frequency analysis.http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EnEnKL.pdf

On the Coherence between Dynamics of the World Fuel
Consumption (WFC) and Global Temperature Anomaly
L.B. Klyashtorin & A.A. LyubushinCONCLUSION
Unlike the monotonously and exponentially increasing of WFC, the dynamics of
global dT against the background of an age-long linear trend, undergo quasi-cyclic
fluctuations with a period about 60 years. No true linear correlation exists between the Global dT and WFC dynamics for the last 140 years.
Spectral analysis of reconstructed temperature for the last 1400 years and
instrumentally measured (for the last 140 years) global temperature anomaly dT shows cyclic 50-60 year variations for the last 1000 years.
Modeling of roughly 60-years cyclic dT changes suggest that observed rise of dT
will level off in the next 5-10 years, when we might expect the lowering of dT by
nearly 0.1-0.15°C to the end of 2020s.
Leonid B. Klyashtorin (Doctor of Sciences in Marine Biology & Fisheries)
Alexey A. Lyubushin (Doctor of Sciences in geophysics)http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EnEnKL.pdf

@ Girma Aug 23 10:03
Thank you for the link to the L.B. Klyashtorin & A.A. Lyubushin paper. I also have found this post, now archived;http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/03/a-question-of-watts-are-we-heating-the-earth-too-much-with-heat/.
However, I am still unsure that the simple math(s) does not indicate a negligible effect on this planet’s temperature from our production of non-solar derived energy: a figure for this being 14 Terajoules/sec or 14 Terawatts. This equates to 0.03W for every m2 of surface area.
It has been postulated 1: that a 1% increase in solar irradiative change produces a climate forcing of 0.24 W/m2 globally. That 2: the climate forcing by increased greenhouse gases from 1980 to 1986 was about 0.25 W/m2. And that the difference from the Maunder Minimum to now is around a 0.25% change in solar irradience. http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=4778&page=1 pages 3&4 being cited for the numbers postulated. As I understand it, W/m2 figures quoted in the reference are per m2 of planet surface.
Therefore, our 0.03W/m2 figure, which is a direct forcing, equates to a solar irradiative change of 0.125%.
Given that the 0.25% in solar irradiative change is what we have experienced since the Maunder Minimum (LIA), 0.125% (half) is not insignificant in terms of effects experienced on the ground since then. Put this together with 2: above and the doubts over the temperature records which this springs from, it could be very significant indeed.

Scott says:
August 23, 2010 at 4:37 pm
“With regards to Death Valley temperatures, shouldn’t it be one of the places MOST affected by CO2 warming? At below sea level, it is under higher pressure and thus (a) higher CO2 partial pressures/concentrations and (b) subject to more collisional broadening of the CO2 absorption bands. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, there is little H2O to absorb IR, so the absolute (and certainly the percentage) effect of CO2 should be more here than in humid areas.”
Sounds reasonable to me. However, although the relative humidity may be quite low, I suspect that the absolute humidity is more on a par with the mid-west generally.

Girma,
Look at my 1st post on this thread. That a Spectral analysis of the Hadcet & longer term Cen. Eng. Data. There one can see the secular changes going on.
Wood Fortress has a fun site,http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1990/plot/rss/from:1990/trend
But you do have to be careful when doing spectral analysis or Fourier convolution. First remove a trend (pick beg. & end pt.s), do the filtering, and then restore the trend.
This method compared well to the EMD (Empirical Mode Decompostion) method of Lin & Wang.

Yuba Yollabolly
Here is IPCC projection of Global Mean Temperature Anomaly (GMTA):http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo1.jpg
From the above graph, IPCC projections of GMTA are as follows:
Year => GMTA (deg C)
2005 => 0.5
2010 => 0.6
2015 => 0.7
Your web link above gives a mean value of about 0.4 deg C for the GMTA, which is 0.2 deg C below IPCC’s exaggerated value. We should believe what we see, not what we are told by the AGW campaigners.

J. Bob
Here is my own graph for the global mean temperature anomaly for the last and the current century!http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/orssengo3.png
In the coming years, will the global mean temperature anomaly follow IPCC’s trajectory?
Or will it follow its cyclic path with an overall linear warming of 0.6 deg C per century?
We have to wait and see.

What is the value of near surface air temperature records, anyway?
Even if the temperatures were accurate, comprehensive, evenly distributed and unpolluted by UHI; without corresponding additional information e.g. moisture content, pressure, wind speed; they don’t indicate how much heat is present.

As I said Girma – I hope you are right.
That is an interesting graph. I don’t recall seeing any projection with near that kind of claimed precision in the AR4 (and without error bars). Did it come from individual model runs in the supplemental material? Can you please cite a specific source?
I do recall this graph from chapter 10:http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-5-3.html
It doasn’t look same in the least.
Thanks

Well I would pick my cherrys differently; so I would toss out that 1940 anomaly, and say that the modern period of global warming started in 1910; way back when CO2 was at ho hum levels. Judging from Phil Jones’ numbers absolutely nothing untoward happened in 1975; except as I recall, that was the timeframe; when Stephen Schneider et al were all wailing about a coming ice age that would cause massive global starvation within ten years.
Others, like Lord Monckton for example, (well known amateur climatologist) have pointed out the repetitive cyclic nature that results in those 30 year cyclic ups and downs. Have not seen an actual overlap done as Steve now shows us; but something out there does seem to like that particular trendy slope; whether it be up or down; and no model crafting can make CO2 a cause for that .
I certainly don’t see what Tamino sees as special about 1975; she must have some other graphs that we don’t know about; or izzat Pamina I’m thinking of ?

“””” ShrNfr says:
August 23, 2010 at 7:32 am
@GeoFlynx I doubt that any serious scientists on this site will disagree that an increase in carbon dioxide does give you a net increase in temperature. “”””
Well I don’t know who is saying what here; but I certainly consider myself a serious scientist; and I certainly “disagree that an increase in carbon dioxide does give you a net increase in temperature”.
And the basis for my disagreement is the complete lack of any data showing such a relationship. CO2 certainly continues to go up; and at least the current trend is monotonically up. But the Temperature or its trend is certainly NOT monotonically up; it goes up, and it goes down; and itdoesn’t show any net relationship to CO2; nor does it show any logarithmic connection to CO2.
Take the Phil Jones Temperatures above that Steve gives; and take the well documented Mauna Loa CO2 data; and please somebody plot for us the straight line logarithmic relationship between those two.
Or else please quit talking about such a non existent relationship; nor is there a linear relationship.
Oh, and also please do look up that word “net” in a dictionary. There’s lots of “holes” in that net, including the effect of WATER.
Yes I most certainly do believe that it is true that CO2 does intercept some LWIR radiation emitted from the earth surface with (evidently) an apparent global average source Temperature of about 288 K. (about 390 W/m^2) Their numbers; not mine.
And I even suspect that the fundamental “forcing” that starts that CO2 “net” Temperature increasing trapping mechanism does itself vary with the fourth power of the Surface Temperature; so which is the cause, and which is the effect ?
I could also record that at the end of a quite unremarkable work week that started out with two days of local all time record high temperatures (for those dates); record highs incidently that were themselves quite unremarkable ordinary record highs; that won’t make the record books for any record record highs, we had two midweek days of unremarkable non record highs but still with quite noticeable early morning radiant warmth from the sun; due to the low atmospheric humidity, and relative lack of the solar spectrum “heat” absorbing H2O vapor; we finally got up (this morning) to an early morning dew; and the beginning of some high altitude cloudiness; and a noticeable deficiency in that solar heat spectrum intensity at sunrise; clearly an indication that the H2O vapor was doing its thing in taking out parts of the solar spectrum that human skin senses as “heat”.
The LWIR radiation that interracts with the CO2 (and the H2O) is quite beyond any human sensing mechanism; and is NOT recorded as “heat” by us, although its effect on the atmosphere because of the GHGs is an increase in molecular kinetic energy which is what we denote as heat in the Temperature sense.
So any 4-H club or 8th grade science student (maybe 5th) could have used this week in San Jose, to write a learned dissertation on global warming. The effect of CO2 was noticeably absent this week. IT’S THE WATER !!

“So any 4-H club or 8th grade science student (maybe 5th) could have used this week in San Jose, to write a learned dissertation on global warming. The effect of CO2 was noticeably absent this week. IT’S THE WATER !!”
Perhaps a grade-schooler could write a term paper about it and get a passing grade. But no doctoral student could write a dissertation about climate -based solely on local, short term weather- and expect to achieve their degree.
Even at UAH.
How DO the regulars here know when they are being poe’d?

For permission, contact us. See the About>Contact menu under the header.

All rights reserved worldwide.

Some material from contributors may contain additional copyrights of their respective company or organization.

We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on WUWT. If you continue to use this site we will assume that you are happy with it. This notice is required by recently enacted EU GDPR rules, and since WUWT is a globally read website, we need to keep the bureaucrats off our case!
Cookie Policy